I do find the feeding frenzy of commentary here fascinating.

Here's my own angle, and why I opened my yap to begin with. I could immediately tell that this would be one of those videos that would sort people into two camps, one that says "this is awesome, more people should do this", and the other that says "this is horrible, what kind of asshole does something like that?"

I fall into the latter category. I think people in the other camp are broken human beings in some way I have yet to really understand.

To me, premeditated plans to hurt other human beings are not something moral people should do without a really good reason. "Because they stole from me" just isn't enough in my book, especially if you were intentionally trying to get someone to steal from you just to give yourself a justification for inflicting harm on another human being.

I keep throwing out examples where the items stolen are essentially worthless (pens, trudging on the grass in my backyard), and where the danger I'm secretly presenting to the "criminal" is high (explosions, both times), to see whether people defend that (as GeeSussFreeK did), or if someone who supports the filmmaker's actions will clearly take a stand against landmines and exploding pens as being immoral.

The closest I've gotten is Psychologic telling me that those situations differ from what's in the video in a special way (i.e. bikes are inherently dangerous in ways that pens & grass aren't), which at least implies that he thinks landmines aren't okay.

Most are pointedly ignoring those examples, and just tossing insults at the people who think the filmmaker did something wrong.

My point is really this: you libertarians and property rights aficionados have misunderstood your own credo. What's the first axiom of libertarian philosophy? Self ownership. A person's body is their property. Whatever else you might say about the thief, his body is his property, and the filmmaker knowingly and intentionally made an effort to damage it.

It's true that the thief could have avoided the danger. But you guys always tell me that we don't need safety regulations, because if someone gets hurt by the actions of another person, that other person owes their victim restitution (imstellar in particular gets credit for explaining that one to me a year or more ago). This is why the filmmaker should be free to endanger people without hassles from the state in the first place.

So, let me restate what I said in my first comment here: they both owe each other restitution. The thief stole from the filmmaker, and should make him whole. The filmmaker also intentionally sabotaged the bike, which may have damaged the thief's property (his body), so he owes the thief restitution to make him whole.

If you walk away from that, you are not defenders of equal, individual rights, you are just a bunch of fair-weather libertarians. You want your rights respected when it means you get to skip on having to pay taxes, but when it comes to having to defend people you don't really like, you're ready to toss them to the wolves (and film the carnage and sell it to people).

Tags for this video have been changed from 'glenn beck, socialism, confused, people, hitler, fair weather libertarians, dipers' to 'glenn beck, socialism, Max Blumenthal, hitler, fair weather libertarians, dipers' - edited by Throbbin

Tags for this video have been changed from 'glenn beck, socialism, confused, people, hitler, fair weather libertarians' to 'glenn beck, socialism, confused, people, hitler, fair weather libertarians, dipers' - edited by Fusionaut